Meet the Residents of MacDonough Street

“When I moved to this neighborhood, there were only a couple of people who were clearly like: ‘What are you doing here?’”

—Brooke Vermillion

Tap to see price history of home

Brooke Vermillion, 38Current Owner, Forensic linguist

Lives with: Her husband Benjamin

Moved from: Lived abroad and before that in Williamsburg

I first visited the block on a Sunday. There were all these nice old ladies dressed up going to church. It was peaceful and quiet, just like a small town. That was such a revelation. I grew up in Northern California, and Do the Right Thing and Sesame Street sort of represented New York to me, but I didn’t realize that was Bed-Stuy. And then when I got here, I was like, “Oh, this is New York. This is what I was looking for.” I almost burst into tears I was so happy.

In some ways, I feel like there was a lot more going on in the neighborhood then. People would have bars in their basements — these 50-year-old women would have bars, would sell food. Probably up until four years ago, each night of the week was a different spot you could visit. That’s something we’ve lost. I was pretty plugged in because I used to hang out at the Casablanca before its current incarnation. It was owned by a woman named Esther. It was a serious old-timers bar — like 70 and up mostly. It was the best bar that I’ve ever known anywhere in the world. You had to ring a doorbell to get in. And people would make little flyers for entertainment in their houses and put them up there. When the Casablanca closed, Esther was put in a home and eventually died. And the people dispersed.

When I moved to this neighborhood, there were only a couple of people who would not say hi to me, who were clearly like: “What the fuck are you doing here?” The real fear that was expressed to me when I moved here was not necessarily about gentrification. It was that people on this block had been here their whole lives, had created the neighborhood, took care of each other, and trusted one another. It wasn’t about race necessarily. They wanted people to come, buy homes, stay, and raise families here, as everyone else had done. They didn’t like people coming and going, because they’re not going to put in time. They’re not going to babysit your kids. They’re not going to be part of your community.

These steps next door are, like, the Spot — the main house in the whole neighborhood. Brother is the patriarch. Then there’s June, who’s often there, and Doc. Doc is one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met and my best friend in the neighborhood. When you talk to him, you try to place him: “Was he a famous rapper in the early ’90s?” He’s like a famous person. He and I have a lot in common. He’s really into African history and African-American history, Egyptian stuff, Swahili. We trade books.

The man who was selling this house, Arthur, was a painter and an interesting character, but he didn’t get along with the neighbors. Arthur haunts the house sometimes. We see ghosts here. And a lot of other people have seen them, including Brother’s son, Jamie. They have really distinct personalities. There’s Ada Youngblood, who used to own the house in the ’50s. She doesn’t like it when we do construction projects. She shows her displeasure by walking back and forth on the third floor really fast — clop, clop, clop, clop, kind of angry. There’s Henry, Arthur’s brother, who’s this really calming, nurturing presence, who kind of looks in on you every once in a while. He spends most of his time in the third-floor closet. There’s a weird trickster ghost that is actually kind of terrifying that is in a bedroom where a friend of mine used to stay. [My friend] woke up in the middle of the night once and saw these two 19th-century boys playing with a ball in the center of his room. And then he saw me as a ghost, as an old lady hovering above him, screaming. And I saw this Elizabethan-style disembodied head, kind of laughing. We also see a lot of light orbs in the house.

Home History

1900195020002015

1964Purchased by Coppedge family

1990Inherited by Coppedge sons

2009Bought by Brooke Vermillion for $649,000

More on Do the Right Thing’s depiction of Bed-Stuy.

Bed-Stuy in film

The most famous film depicting the neighborhood is undoubtedly Do the Right Thing, from 1989. Spike Lee—who grew up nearby, in Fort Greene—shot on Stuyvesant Avenue between Lexington Avenue and Quincy Street, beefing up the block with artificial façades during filming. “I wanted to reflect the racial climate of New York City at that time. I’m a New Yorker, so I know that after 95 degrees, the homicide rate and domestic abuse goes up—especially when you get that weeklong or so heat wave.” Lee has said. This past August, that block was officially named Do the Right Thing Way.

One brownstone building that isn’t in Bedford-Stuyvesant is 123 Sesame Street. Though the neighborhood looks kind of like a lot of spots in Brooklyn and Manhattan, the show’s creators have insisted that the set was based on generalized, nonspecific New York streets.

Meet one of the current owners of the Casablanca

The Casablanca

Photo: Dina Litovsky for New York Magazine

“I’ve lived about three blocks away from here for the last six years. Friends of friends bought the building from Esther Williams, the previous owner of the bar. I’d been a customer a couple of times and Esther had served me. But she reached a point where she couldn’t do it anymore. Construction took one and a half years, beginning to end, and we opened just before Christmas of 2014.

“I probably wouldn’t have gone for someplace in this part of Bed-Stuy that wasn’t this. It’s on a corner. It’s a natural bar. It’s a beautiful building, although it needed a lot of work. Even without the bar, it’s one of the more grand buildings on Malcolm X. We’ve met two different couples that met here in the 1970s, married, and now come in together. People have told me about a shooting in the bar, years ago, right down to the very spot where it happened. It’s been well received—a lot of people in the neighborhood are happy that there’s something here now.” —Jonn Carlson, co-owner of the Casablanca since 2014

Hear Brooke talk about the Coppedge family and see the paintings of Arthur Coppedge.

Arthur Coppedge

Courtesy of Peg Alston Collection, New York

“He had grown up here—he and his brother, Henry, and his mom lived in this house. Henry ended up staying here as an adult, and he was beloved by everybody in the neighborhood. And then Henry got sick and died in 2005. Arthur came back to take care of him and then to take care of the house. I think because he was in mourning and because he had grown up in this neighborhood, it just wasn’t romantic to him to have a bunch of people hanging out outside of his house 12 hours a day. He was really intolerant of that. One day, he put grease on the railing and ruined my friend’s Elevation jacket. For those guys, he seemed like a cranky snob.”—Brooke Vermillion